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Comment by voynich61 | Hacker News Reader

>We're rolling down a dangerous hill which will lead to the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists.

Liberaltarian fear-mongering is becoming as divorced from reality as the neo-con strain. Do you genuinely believe that the French government is going to become a tyrannical dystopia? I can't imagine this _freedom_ you are slavishly devoted to being anything else than the freedom to consume media for free with impunity or to say stupid shit on 4chan or HN without the government knowing.

So the government sniffs a few packets. It's major news whenever a Western government does anything that could even remotely be construed as an abuse of power; even the Snowden leaks are laughably underwhelming in this regard.

I suppose people crave existential threats, because they are interesting. Maybe some day you'll wake up from this 1984-inspired fever dream and see how boring the reality of the situation really is.

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The combination of flippant rhetoric ("so the government sniffs a few packets") with name-calling ("fear-mongering", "stupid shit") and personalization ("maybe some day you'll wake up") puts this comment into flamewar territory. Please don't. Instead, edit out the uncivil and unsubstantive bits until your comment is civil and substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What I find interesting is that you don't even try to justify government surveillance, you just approach it as if the natural state of affairs is that they get to know everything.

I sincerely hope that you are in a minority with such a dangerous, misguided belief, but I suspect you are not.

Most people here work for more Orwellian companies doing worst thing with data they acquired with dubious ways than anything the french government could do.

>dangerous

In the extreme, yeah, it's dangerous. We're so far from that point in the Western world that I don't fear it right now.

>natural state of affairs

Yes, it is the natural state of affairs that the government have the power to snoop on us with a warrant. Otherwise, law enforcement has their hands tied behind their back. 1st grade civics tbh

>the government have the power to snoop on us with a warrant

Even die-hard libertarians understand that and don't claim otherwise.

So where is the warrant for all the phone calls that the NSA (or their collaborators like Verizon, etc.) keeps track of?

Only now do you include a warrant. How much of the "laughable" Snowden-revealed spying was under cover of warrants, do you suppose?

Waaaiiiiit a minute ... you're a troll, aren't you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=voynich61

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

I think this user is earnest in his or her beliefs. They're just unpopular on HN.

Is the Voynich manuscript a troll artifact (like the Piltdown man bone)? From wikipedia, it looked like just an undeciphered manuscript.

> Waaaiiiiit a minute ... you're a troll, aren't you?

Please don't.

Apologies

> Do you genuinely believe that the French government is going to become a tyrannical dystopia?

None of the developed western societies want that. All of us will succumb to it, via the best (and worst) of intentions.

If you're going to make such a grandiose claim, you should provide some evidence.

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